Reconciling gifts

Reconciling is deciding which donor each incoming gift belongs to. Relae does most of it. Your part is the handful it is unsure about.

The weekly routine

Ten minutes, once a week, in this order:

1. Import anything that does not arrive on its own. The platform exports for the week.
2. Open the review queue. Answer what is there.
3. Glance at duplicates, if any have been proposed.

That is the whole job. A shop that does this weekly never has a reconciliation project.

Answering the queue

Each item shows the incoming gift and what Relae thinks. You have three answers.

Confirm. Yes, that is the right person. Most items.

Choose a different record. Relae guessed wrong, and you know who it is.

Create new. Nobody in your records is this person.

The suggestion says which record and why. The reason is the part to read, because it tells you what the engine had to go on.

When you are not sure

Create a new record.

A duplicate is easy to merge later. A wrong merge is harder to unpick, and until you notice it you have one person’s giving history attached to another person’s name, which is the worst outcome available. When in doubt, keep them separate.

Organizations

A foundation, a business or a granting body will often match nobody, which is correct. Create the organization as a record and mark it as an organization rather than a person.

Relae remembers, so that funder is never questioned again.

What gets remembered

Every decision you commit is stored and reapplied on the next import. This is why the queue shrinks. If you find yourself answering the same question twice, something is wrong and worth reporting.

You can search everything Relae has learned and remove a decision that turns out to be wrong.

A decision that was right and is now wrong

People change names. If you taught Relae that a name maps to one person and it later belongs to someone else, remove the stored decision rather than working around it. Otherwise it keeps applying.

Duplicates already in your records

Separate from incoming gifts, Relae sweeps for records that look like the same person twice, usually inherited from an old system.

You decide on each proposed pair, and a merge can be undone for thirty days.

Relae proposes only what the evidence supports, and every merge can be undone for thirty days.

Checking totals

Once a quarter, compare your Relae total for a period against a number you already trust, like your bank deposits or your bookkeeper’s figure. If they disagree, the usual causes are a channel you have not imported recently, gross against net amounts, or gifts sitting unmatched in the queue.

Next

• Matching and the review queue, for how the engine decides.
• Issuing receipts, which depends on reconciled gifts.